I report the further characterization of an essential S. cerevisiae nucleoporin, RAT7/NUP159, shown previously to be involved in mRNA export. The Rat7p/Nup159p can be divided into three domains: an N-terminal domain, a central repeat domain, and a...

Cholera is a diarrheal disease caused by the Gram-negative bacterium Vibrio cholerae. The disease is acquired by oral ingestion of contaminated water or food. In order for Vibrio cholerae to cause the disease cholera, it must produce two important...

Despite being cloned over twenty years ago, many regulatory mechanisms of the β-globin genes have yet to be fully elucidated. The regulation of the β-globin locus in erythroid cells requires chromatin structural changes before the genes can be...

Nearly one billion individuals worldwide have elevated blood pressure (BP) and 90% of these cases are due to unknown causes. Aldosterone is the primary hormone regulating Na + reabsorption in the kidney and is therefore a major determinant of the...

Swarming motility is a flagella-dependent surface motility, and is also a form of bacterial group behavior. Similar to its counterpart biofilm formation, our understanding of swarming motility has been hampered by its complex set of requirements...

Proteins are ubiquitous in cells and are essential to a wide range of biological processes. Since existing proteins occupy only a small portion of the space of possible amino acid composition, understanding their sequence-structure-function...

Arsenic is implicated in numerous human pathologies, including cancer and several forms of liver disease. One contributing mechanism may involve alterations of CYP levels by arsenic. CYP3As are the most abundant CYP proteins in human liver and...

Proper chromosome alignment and segregation depends on the formation and maintenance of a bipolar mitotic spindle with focused poles. It has been shown that microtubules are focused at spindle poles through the combined actions of centrosomes and a...

Cyclic diguanylate (c-di-GMP) is a primarily bacterial and nearly universal second messenger used to stimulate a variety of responses from the cell by binding effector proteins. It is created by enzymes called diguanylate cyclases (DGCs) and broken...

NIMA-related kinases (Neks) control several aspects of cell division downstream of master mitotic regulators such as Cdk1 and Plk1. Though depletion of Nek6, Nek7, or Nek9 results in cytokinesis failure, to date no molecular mechanism has been...

As the human population increases, it is imperative that we develop strategies to improve agricultural productivity to meet the growing demand for food, fuel and fiber. More than 2 billion people suffer from "hidden hunger" (a lack of essential...

Hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) balance self-renewal with the continuous production of the suitable numbers of lineage-restricted progenitor cells. In this work we demonstrate that the Mixed lineage leukemia 1 (Mll1) gene is essential for this...

Niemann-Pick type C (NPC) is a neurovisceral disease that causes intracellular accumulation of cholesterol and other lipids. The exact mechanism how the defects in cholesterol trafficking pathways result in the progressive neurological damage is...

Iron and zinc are essential metal micronutrients that most humans acquire from plant-based diets. Unfortunately, plants are not a good source of these micronutrients, so billions of people worldwide suffer from deficiencies of these two elements....

The frequency gene and the two proteins it encodes are central components of the Neurospora circadian clock. The frq message and proteins are involved in a negative feedback loop in which FRO represses its own transcript level. Based on this...

Circadian rhythms in a wide variety of cellular and metabolic processes are well documented in many organisms. An important step in understanding the molecular basis of the circadian clock is the characterization of clock-controlled genes. mRNA...

Plant MADS proteins play critical roles in vegetative and reproductive development. DNA binding and yeast three-hybrid assays suggest that plant MADS proteins function as dimers or multimers. However, little is known about how plant MADS proteins...

Cholesterol is essential for the survival of all mammalian cells. Mammalian cells obtain cholesterol via two pathways: it can be endogenously synthesized in the endoplasmic reticulum, or it can be obtained from exogenous sources, mainly through the...

Iron and zinc deficiency commonly limit plant growth and crop yields. Furthermore, deficiencies in both of these micronutrients are common throughout the world, particularly in developing countries where people may only consume simple diets...

Core binding factor (CBF) is a heterodimeric transcription factor that is essential for a number of developmental process including hemotopoiesis and bone development. CBFs contain a DNA-binding CBFα. subunit and a non-DNA binding CBFß. subunit...

Despite the availability of targeted therapies, breast cancer metastasis and recurrence remain clinically challenging problems. Understanding the function of stem cells in this disease may lead to identification of genetic pathways underlying...

Previous work in this laboratory has implicated deoxyribonuclease II (DNase II) as an endonuclease responsible for DNA digestion during apoptosis. The goal of this thesis was to isolate the cDNA encoding DNase II and study its potential role in...